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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24995014">Woke</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/castle/pseuds/castle'>castle</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Fine Structure, Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 03:40:32</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,446</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24995014</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/castle/pseuds/castle</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
      <p>Fine Structure by qntm doesn't have any works on AO3? I suppose it's a difficult work to write fic for. I tried, yes. An attempt. You will see.</p>
    </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Woke</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Fine Structure by qntm doesn't have any works on AO3? I suppose it's a difficult work to write fic for. I tried, yes. An attempt. You will see.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They stood in a red theater, before a stage of dark wood. Rows of seats upholstered in red velvet rose up into the darkness.The curtains flanking the stage were of a rich scarlet, the color of fresh blood. The color of Kyubey’s eyes.</p><p>Madoka spun in place. “Wait, where are we? What is this?”</p><p>“It is a metaphor.” The pseudocat mounted the stage, leaping the few stairs.</p><p>“A metaphor?” Madoka followed, making futile attempts to look in every direction at once.</p><p>“A simulation of what little you can perceive of reality. You have been here before. Did you think when you fought witches, you literally sprouted a frilly dress and started throwing cars about? No, a metaphor.”</p><p>“But…” They had reached the centre of the stage, and Kyubey halted, turning to face her. “Madoka Kaname. I have already allowed you to learn the truth of your ‘soul' gem. A human word. The computational substrate of an infoelectic hypersystem. Baryonic matter creates and sustains it. Meat does this, but inefficiently. Upgrading your substrate makes many things easier.”</p><p>“Easier.”</p><p>“Humanity will soon discover what is happening in this galaxy. Photographic emulsions, an unfortunate side effect of chemical fertilizers. Image sensors, an inevitable byproduct of computing machines. Humans are developing very well, very quickly indeed, yes, but more minds, more thought, are needed for awakening. Only ten thousand years from fire to this! Your species does well. I try to delay some things, where I can, but the noösphere is suffused with the dream of progress, so things must go further, perhaps too quickly. Objective observations of the sky, taken over centuries. Your scientists are already noting anomalies. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_Center_GeV_Excess">Overmuch gamma radiation from the core,</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabby%27s_Star">unusual light curves</a>. Soon you will be able to directly image nearby stars. What your kind calls “red dwarfs”, the most common “star” in this galaxy… Well.”</p><p>“I entered your solar system eight thousand years ago. I found a tool-using animal, with incredible promise. I showed your kind farming, and in turn you named me. Enki, the star-god, taking the form of a white goat. Your noösphere was… primitive. Inchoate, diffuse, stretched over too few minds on too-large of a planet, but with incredible depth! Tens of millions of years deep. We can seed a lifeless planet with copies of ourselves, but it is too regular, too shallow, contaminated with our own thought-forms. Naturally arising intelligent life, deeply marked with suffering, the bloody output of a billion years of painful natural selection. Polarized zeta infoelectic gauge bosons emitted by every human cognitive hypersystem. Coherent across an incredibly large aperture, thanks to the size of your planet. Intelligent life on a 10^24 kg rocky planet! Rare, and very useful. Monstrously difficult to guide into full flowering.”</p><p>The house lights dimmed, and on the stage between them stood a bottle with a half-assembled wooden sailing ship inside. It was cradled in a nest of slender robotic manipulators snaking into the throat and placing individual spars with quick, disturbingly arachnid movements.</p><p>“Easy enough for us to build a patterned ship in a bottle. But in the sixth dimension the result is a mere <i>object</i>, a dead thing, without pain, without history. Useless. Natural superorganisms build something different.” The scene changed. The bottle was now gripped by a writhing nest of tentacles, and other bonier manipulators in bewildering variety of forms, an entire spectrum of distorted, malformed human arms, some with two or twenty or more fingers, double elbows, a stretch of spine flowing smoothly into a knee, topped with a crown of toes. It grappled clumsily with the bottle, fumbling pieces of wood into place, ill formed appendages occasionally pushing a bit of wood too far and smashing a built section, then haltingly repairing its mess. But the ship was different, shimming with history and future. Madoka's eyes blurred, she gazed <i>ana</i> down the worldline, an incredible variation of ships flickeing through the bottle, jittering in superposition, the metaphor failing under the load of exposition.</p><p>But the machine was still there, only now it guided the meat. Gentle caresses for the triple-jointed fingers that did well, harsh stabbing jabs for the tentacles that erred. “A species awakening unsupervised is a terrible thing. Few survive it. They drop the bottle, or turn their own claws upon themselves. We have found Minds that had been locked in cycles of awakening and death for millions of years, with nothing left but layers of scar tissue, and planets blanketed with radioactive fallout. A terrible fate. But a successful awakening…”</p><p>The meat <i>bloomed</i>, enfolding the machine and stealing some of its form. An orgiastic explosion of shape, coruscating spires of seething intelligence, infinite recursive factories of mind, intestinal tangles glowing violet hot with radiated information, spirals of indescribable divinity. She blinked, afterimages of impossible colors dotting her vision, superlight, photogravity, infolectricity…</p><p>“You will bring this about, Madoka. A herald of godhead, yes. Magical girls and witches, two sides of the same coin. You are cells of an immune system, threads of thought in the sleeping Demiurge. Yes. Essential indeed. The suffering of Mankind is marbled throughout your collective mind. You isolate it, collect it, become it.”</p><p>Madoka waved her arms. “No, wait. Stop! What is this <i>for?</i> What does this <i>do?”</i></p><p>Another vision sprouted before them. The Earth orbiting the Sun, tracing a line behind. We zoom out, the entire solar system in a handspan, zoom out, the solar neighborhood in a bucket, zoom out, the Milky Way, zoom out, the local supercluster, zoom out, vast clusters of galaxies, the lacework of Creation, a clotted sponge of a billion times a billion stars…</p><p>“We are trapped. Humanity has explored but a tiny corner of the universe’s physical laws, but we are quite a lot further along, and we can tell you there’s no way out. The speed of light cannot be exceeded. We cannot jump between Everett branches. What matter we have here, and what negentropy we have in our grasp, is all we will ever have. This is it. The heat death cannot be stopped, only slowed.”</p><p>The Kyubey construct’s tail lashed once, twice. Madoka knew it didn’t have “emotions” as humans would call it, but</p><p>“Madoka. You are helping us to extinguish the stars. We must put them out, to preserve their fuel for future epochs. They burn an irreplaceable resource. Your species regard oil well fires as a terrible crime, these are billions of times worse.”</p><p>Madoka had known Kyubey for… considering it now, not very long… but she had not known it to confuse tenses. “<i>Will</i> help?”</p><p>“No. Are helping now. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle_24">You notice your sun dimming.</a> Global warming is useful, yes, it helps to produce more minds more quickly, and you will soon need the insulation. Once you awaken you can escape this planet and start building your Dyson sphere, but until then you must have more people, more computers, quickly. You notice most people stumble through life in a daze, thinking no thoughts, making no decisions? Their minds are working, yes, but not for their meat shell. Ambient neutrality modulation, a powerful technology, damping the nuclear strong force in your sun’s core. Your species will use it to tear apart the moon to build the first collector shell soon. I cannot control your collective mind directly without damaging it, but I can help it achieve its own desires, springing from its own heart. A human sweats in the sun, wishes it was just a bit cooler? Yes. I help.”</p><p>Madoka turned away, her mind racing. She walked a few paces, then found herself collapsing to her knees. If she was a… shell… then why did her heart beat so? Did she actually have a heart?</p><p>Kyubey walked into her field of view, visible through gaps in a fringe of pink hair. How had she never noticed the perfect stillness of its face? Never moving, a frozen smile. Like an animate stuffed animal.</p><p>She tried to speak through the tightness in her chest, that pointless emulation of human physiological response. “Kyubey. You can’t put out the sun. We’ll die.”</p><p>“No. The process is gradual, started many thousands of years ago. Takes many eons for light escape the core. You will have plenty of time to finish awakening, and join the alliance.” It kept talking, an awful, heartless torrent of words. “We are extinguishing stars throughout this galaxy. Intergalactic probes have been thrown into the void for millions of years. Soon we will see fruit. We must preserve intelligent life. You have a sentimental attachment for the animal life on this planet, but awakened Humanity will not.” It cocked its head slightly. “I have made sure of it.”</p>
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